The Fourth Hand

"I love it! I love what you did to me."

"Okay. I'll see you before too long," was the way Mrs. Clausen closed the conversation--she didn't even say good-bye.

The next morning, at the script meeting, Wallingford tried not to think that Mary Shanahan was behaving like a woman who was having a bad period, only more so, but that was his impression. Mary began the meeting by abusing one of the newsroom women. Her name was Eleanor and, for whatever reason, she'd slept with one of the summer interns; now that the boy had gone back to college, Mary accused Eleanor of robbing the cradle.

Only Wallingford knew that, before he'd stupidly agreed to try to make Mary pregnant, Mary had propositioned the intern. He was a good-looking boy, and he was smarter than Wallingford--he'd rejected Mary's proposal. Patrick not only liked Eleanor for sleeping with the boy; he had also liked the boy, whose summer internship had not entirely lacked an authentic experience. (Eleanor was one of the oldest of the married women in the newsroom.)

Only Wallingford knew that Mary didn't really give a damn that Eleanor had slept with the boy--she was just angry because she had her period.

Suddenly the idea of taking a field assignment, any assignment, attracted Patrick. It would at least get him out of the newsroom, and out of New York. He told Mary that she would find him open to a field assignment, next time, provided that she not try to accompany him where he was being sent. (Mary had volunteered to travel with him the next time she was ovulating.)

There was, in the near future, Wallingford informed Mary, only one day and night when he would not be available for a field assignment or to anchor the evening news. He was attending a Monday Night Football game in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on November 1, 1999--no matter what.

Someone (probably Mary) leaked it to ABC Sports that Patrick Wallingford would be at the game that night, and ABC immediately asked the lion guy to stop by the booth during the telecast. (Why say no to a two-minute appearance before how many million viewers? Mary would say to Patrick.) Maybe disaster man could even call a play or two. Did Wallingford know, someone from ABC asked, that his hand-eating episode had sold almost as many videos as the annual NFL highlights film?

Yes, Wallingford knew. He respectfully declined the offer to visit the ABC commentators. As he put it, he was attending the game with "a special friend;" he didn't use Doris's name. This might mean that a TV camera would be on him during the game, but so what? Patrick didn't mind waving once or twice, just to show them what they wanted to see--the no-hand, or what Mrs. Clausen called his fourth hand. Even the sports hacks wanted to see it.

That may have been why Wallingford got a more enthusiastic response to his letters of inquiry to public-television stations than he received from public radio or the Big Ten journalism schools. All the PBS affiliates were interested in him. In general, Patrick was heartened by the collective response; he would have a job to go to, possibly even an interesting one.

Naturally he breathed not a word of this to Mary, while he tried to anticipate what field assignments she might offer him. A war wouldn't have surprised him; an E. coli bacteria outbreak would have suited Mary's mood.

Wallingford longed to learn why Mrs. Clausen insisted on waiting to see him until a Monday Night Football game in Green Bay. He phoned her on Saturday night, October 30, although he knew he would see her the coming Monday, but Doris remained noncommittal on the subject of the game's curious importance to her. "I just get anxious when the Packers are favored," was all she said.

Wallingford went to bed fairly early that Saturday night. Vito called once, around midnight, but Patrick quickly fell back to sleep. When the phone rang on Sunday morning--it was still dark outside--Wallingford assumed it was Vito again; he almost didn't answer. But it was Mary Shanahan, and she was all business.

"I'll give you a choice," she told him, without bothering to say hello or so much as his name. "You can cover the scene at Kennedy, or we'll get you a plane to Boston and a helicopter will take you to Otis Air Force Base."

"Where's that?" Wallingford asked.

"Cape Cod. Do you know what's happened, Pat?"

"I was asleep, Mary."

"Well, turn on the fucking news! I'll call you back in five minutes. You can forget about going to Wisconsin."

"I'm going to Green Bay, no matter what," he told her, but she'd already hung up. Not even the brevity of her call or the harshness of her message could dispel from Patrick's memory the little-girlish and excessively floral pattern of Mary's bedspread, or the pink undulations of her Lava lamp and their protozoan movements across her bedroom ceiling--the shadows racing like sperm.

Wallingford turned on the news. An Egyptian jetliner carrying 217 people had taken off from Kennedy, an overnight flight bound for Cairo. It had disappeared from radar screens only thirty-three minutes after take-off. Cruising at 33,000 feet in good weather, the plane had suddenly plummeted into the Atlantic about sixty miles southeast of Nantucket Island. There'd been no distress call from the cockpit. Radar sweeps indicated that the jet's rate of descent was more than 23,000 feet per minute--"like a rock," an aviation expert put it. The water was fifty-nine degrees and more than 250 feet deep; there was little hope that anyone had survived the crash.

It was the kind of crash that opened itself up to media speculation--the reports would all be speculative. Human-interest stories would abound. A businessman who preferred to be unnamed had arrived late at the airport and been turned away at the ticket counter. When they'd told him the flight was closed, he'd screamed at them. He went home and woke up in the morning, alive. That kind of thing would go on for days.

One of the airport hotels at Kennedy, the Ramada Plaza, had been turned into an information and counseling center for grieving family members--not that there was much information. Nevertheless, Wallingford went there. He chose Kennedy over Otis Air Force Base on the Cape--the reason being that the media would have limited access to the Coast Guard crews who'd been searching the debris field. By dawn that Sunday, they'd reportedly found only a small flotsam of wreckage and the remains of one body. On the choppy sea, there was nothing adrift that looked burned, which suggested there'd been no explosion.

Patrick first spoke to the relatives of a young Egyptian woman who'd collapsed outside the Ramada Plaza. She'd fallen in a heap, in view of the television cameras surrounding the entrance to the hotel; police officers carried her into the lobby. Her relatives told Wallingford that her brother had been on the plane.

Naturally the mayor was there, giving what solace he could. Wallingford could always count on a comment from the mayor. Giuliani seemed to like the lion guy more than he liked most reporters. Maybe he saw Patrick as a kind of police officer who'd been wounded in the line of duty; more likely, the mayor remembered Wallingford because Wallingford had only one hand.

"If there's anything the City of New York can do to help, that's what we're trying to do," Giuliani told the press. He looked a little tired when he turned to Patrick Wallingford and said: "Sometimes, if the mayor asks, it happens a little faster."

An Egyptian man was using the lobby of the Ramada as a makeshift mosque: "We belong to God and to God we return," he kept praying, in Arabic. Wallingford had to ask someone for a translation.

At the script meeting before the Sunday-evening telecast, Patrick was told point-blank of the network's plans. "Either you're our anchor tomorrow evening or we've got you on a Coast Guard cutter," Mary Shanahan informed him.

"I'm in Green Bay tomorrow and tomorrow night, Mary," Wallingford said.

"They're going to call off the search for survivors tomorrow, Pat. We want you there, at sea. Or here, in New York. Not in Green Bay."